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A2 Warming Not Anthro/Real
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- Warming is real, anthropogenic and accelerating – prefer reverse biased sources
- Warming is real – prefer recent and rigorous scientific study
- Feedbacks are net positive—must act now to prevent runaway warming
- The peer reviewed studies corroborating our warming claims are best—prefer them over hackery cloaked as skepticism
A2 Warming Not Anthro/RealWarming happening now – rising water temperatures proveUSA Today 11 – leader in news, the widest circulated print newspaper in the United States (Wendy Koch, 1/29/11, " Arctic waters are warmest in 2000 years: Study ", http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011/01/arctic-waters-warmest-2000-years/1) Water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the North Atlantic is now the warmest in at least 2,000 years, reports a new international study that's bad news for climate change as well as polar bears needing sea ice for survival. Waters of the Fram Strait, which runs between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, have warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, according to the study published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Science. Temperatures are about 2.5 degrees higher than during the Medieval Warm Period, a time of elevated warmth from A.D. 900 to 1300. "Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years," study lead author Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, said in announcing the findings. "Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice, which helps to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space," said study co-author Thomas Marchitto, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Arctic lost sea ice larger than the state of Alaska between 1979 and 2009 and could become ice-free during the summers within the next several decades, according to UC's National Snow and Ice Data Center. Warming is real, anthropogenic and accelerating – prefer reverse biased sourcesRobinson, 11 [10/25/11. Eugene, opinion, Washington Post, Citing extensively Muller a physicist at UC Berkely, “The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-scientific-finding-that-settles-the-climate-change-debate/2011/03/01/gIQAd6QfDM_story.html] For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there. The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight. 99 percent bogus “Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention. “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.” In other words, the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong. Muller’s team, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, rigorously explored the specific objections raised by skeptics — and found them groundless. Muller and his fellow researchers examined an enormous data set of observed temperatures from monitoring stations around the world and concluded that the average land temperature has risen 1 degree Celsius — or about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit — since the mid-1950s. This agrees with the increase estimated by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place. The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise — that Muller once snarkily called “the poster child of the global warming community.” Muller’s new graph isn’t just similar, it’s identical. Muller found that skeptics are wrong when they claim that a “heat island” effect from urbanization is skewing average temperature readings; monitoring instruments in rural areas show rapid warming, too. He found that skeptics are wrong to base their arguments on the fact that records from some sites seem to indicate a cooling trend, since records from at least twice as many sites clearly indicate warming. And he found that skeptics are wrong to accuse climate scientists of cherry-picking the data, since the readings that are often omitted — because they are judged unreliable — show the same warming trend. Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers — a total of 1.6 billion records — and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause. It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer. We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work. Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real. It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud. Warming is real – prefer recent and rigorous scientific studyMuller, 11 [OCTOBER 21, 2011 “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism There were good reasons for doubt, until now.”, Mr. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of "Physics for Future Presidents" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008)., http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html] As many as 757 stations in the United States recorded net surface-temperature cooling over the past century. Many are concentrated in the southeast, where some people attribute tornadoes and hurricanes to warming. The temperature-station quality is largely awful. The most important stations in the U.S. are included in the Department of Energy's Historical Climatology Network. A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government's own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world. Using data from all these poor stations, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates an average global 0.64ºC temperature rise in the past 50 years, "most" of which the IPCC says is due to humans. Yet the margin of error for the stations is at least three times larger than the estimated warming. We know that cities show anomalous warming, caused by energy use and building materials; asphalt, for instance, absorbs more sunlight than do trees. Tokyo's temperature rose about 2ºC in the last 50 years. Could that rise, and increases in other urban areas, have been unreasonably included in the global estimates? That warming may be real, but it has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect and can't be addressed by carbon dioxide reduction. Moreover, the three major temperature analysis groups (the U.S.'s NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.K.'s Met Office and Climatic Research Unit) analyze only a small fraction of the available data, primarily from stations that have long records. There's a logic to that practice, but it could lead to selection bias. For instance, older stations were often built outside of cities but today are surrounded by buildings. These groups today use data from about 2,000 stations, down from roughly 6,000 in 1970, raising even more questions about their selections. Enlarge Image On top of that, stations have moved, instruments have changed and local environments have evolved. Analysis groups try to compensate for all this by homogenizing the data, though there are plenty of arguments to be had over how best to homogenize long-running data taken from around the world in varying conditions. These adjustments often result in corrections of several tenths of one degree Celsius, significant fractions of the warming attributed to humans. And that's just the surface-temperature record. What about the rest? The number of named hurricanes has been on the rise for years, but that's in part a result of better detection technologies (satellites and buoys) that find storms in remote regions. The number of hurricanes hitting the U.S., even more intense Category 4 and 5 storms, has been gradually decreasing since 1850. The number of detected tornadoes has been increasing, possibly because radar technology has improved, but the number that touch down and cause damage has been decreasing. Meanwhile, the short-term variability in U.S. surface temperatures has been decreasing since 1800, suggesting a more stable climate. Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer. Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny. Our work covers only land temperature—not the oceans—but that's where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one. We discovered that about one-third of the world's temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC. To study urban-heating bias in temperature records, we used satellite determinations that subdivided the world into urban and rural areas. We then conducted a temperature analysis based solely on "very rural" locations, distant from urban ones. The result showed a temperature increase similar to that found by other groups. Only 0.5% of the globe is urbanized, so it makes sense that even a 2ºC rise in urban regions would contribute negligibly to the global average. What about poor station quality? Again, our statistical methods allowed us to analyze the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones. The mostly likely explanation is that while low-quality stations may give incorrect absolute temperatures, they still accurately track temperature changes. When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. Feedbacks are net positive—must act now to prevent runaway warmingHansen, 8 – head of NASA Goddard Institute and professor of Environmental Sciences, Columbia University (James E. Hanson. Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Columbia University. Al Gore’s science advisor. Introductory chapter for the book State of the Wild. “Tipping point: Perspective of a Scientist.” April. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/StateOfWild_20080428.pdf) Fast feedbacks—changes that occur quickly in response to temperature change—amplify the initial temperature change, begetting additional warming. As the planet warms, fast feedbacks include more water vapor, which traps additional heat, and less snow and sea ice, which exposes dark surfaces that absorb more sunlight. Slower feedbacks also exist. Due to warming, forests and shrubs are moving poleward into tundra regions. Expanding vegetation, darker than tundra, absorbs sunlight and warms the environment. Another slow feedback is increasing wetness (i.e., darkness) of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets in the warm season. Finally, as tundra melts, methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is bubbling out. Paleoclimatic records confirm that the long-lived greenhouse gases— methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide—all increase with the warming of oceans and land. These positive feedbacks amplify climate change over decades, centuries, and longer. The predominance of positive feedbacks explains why Earth’s climate has historically undergone large swings: feedbacks work in both directions, amplifying cooling, as well as warming, forcings. In the past, feedbacks have caused Earth to be whipsawed between colder and warmer climates, even in response to weak forcings, such as slight changes in the tilt of Earth’s axis.2 The second fundamental property of Earth’s climate system, partnering with feedbacks, is the great inertia of oceans and ice sheets. Given the oceans’ capacity to absorb heat, when a climate forcing (such as increased greenhouse gases) impacts global temperature, even after two or three decades, only about half of the eventual surface warming has occurred. Ice sheets also change slowly, although accumulating evidence shows that they can disintegrate within centuries or perhaps even decades. The upshot of the combination of inertia and feedbacks is that additional climate change is already “in the pipeline”: even if we stop increasing greenhouse gases today, more warming will occur. This is sobering when one considers the present status of Earth’s climate. Human civilization developed during the Holocene (the past 12,000 years). It has been warm enough to keep ice sheets off North America and Europe, but cool enough for ice sheets to remain on Greenland and Antarctica. With rapid warming of 0.6°C in the past 30 years, global temperature is at its warmest level in the Holocene.3 The warming that has already occurred, the positive feedbacks that have been set in motion, and the additional warming in the pipeline together have brought us to the precipice of a planetary tipping point. We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice. Little additional forcing is needed to trigger these feedbacks and magnify global warming. If we go over the edge, we will transition to an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity, and there will be no return within any foreseeable future generation. Casualties would include more than the loss of indigenous ways of life in the Arctic and swamping of coastal cities. An intensified hydrologic cycle will produce both greater floods and greater droughts. In the US, the semiarid states from central Texas through Oklahoma and both Dakotas would become more drought-prone and ill suited for agriculture, people, and current wildlife. Africa would see a great expansion of dry areas, particularly southern Africa. Large populations in Asia and South America would lose their primary dry season freshwater source as glaciers disappear. A major casualty in all this will be wildlife. The peer reviewed studies corroborating our warming claims are best—prefer them over hackery cloaked as skepticismDavies 8 – 6/11, Author and Geophysicist at the Australian National University [Dr. Geoff Davies, June 11 2008, Science Alert, “Why listen to scientists?”, Professor Don Aitkin’s recent promotion (PDF 258KB) of the “sceptical” view of global warming and the ensuing heated debates on several web sites bring to the fore the question of what authority attaches to the published conclusions and judgments of climate scientists. Professor Aitkin, who is not a scientist, is in no doubt himself that the more outspoken climate scientists have a “quasi-religious” attitude. That is the mild end of the spectrum of opinions of sceptics/denialists/contrarians. Most of the media and many politicians seem to have the view that scientists are just another interest group, and that scientists’ opinions are just opinions, to be heard or discarded like any others. The Australian government seems to credit only the very conservative end of climate scientists’ warnings, because it is acting as though we have many decades in which to adjust, and many years before anything serious needs to be under way. The big difference between scientists’ professional conclusions and those of others is that science has a pervasive and well-developed quality-control process. The first stage is called peer review. Any paper that is published in a reputable scientific journal must be given the OK by several other scientists in the same field. Furthermore, after publication a paper will be read critically by many more scientists, and it is not uncommon for conclusions to be challenged in subsequent publications. For a paper to become widely acknowledged it must survive such scrutiny for a reasonable period, typically several years. All of this is on top of the fact that a scientific paper is based on observations of the world and on a large accumulation of well-tested regularities, such as the “laws” of physics. Few other groups have any comparable process. Certainly the media, politicians and climate sceptics have no such process. Most of the studies referred to by sceptics have either not been published in a relevant peer-reviewed scientific journal or have subsequently been challenged and found wanting in other peer-reviewed studies. The peer-review process is far from perfect, but it yields a product distinctly less unreliable than all the other opinions flying around. The process of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adds another layer of caution. Basically the IPCC gets a large number of relevant scientists to step back from the front-line disputes and ask “What can most of us agree on?”. Sceptics who dismiss all of the science because there are many disputes miss or obfuscate this basic aspect of IPCC assessments. There is a degree of judgment involved in the IPCC process, and in virtually any public summary by a climate scientist. Some would claim judgment is not the job of scientists; it is the job of politicians and others. But scientists are the best placed to judge the state of knowledge in their field. If their conclusions are potentially of great import, then they have a responsibility to state their best professional judgment. The claim by Professor Aitkin and many other sceptics that climate scientists don’t discuss the uncertainties in their conclusions and judgments simply misrepresents or misperceives the abundant information on uncertainties. Even the IPCC’s most terse summary statements clearly acknowledge uncertainty when they say, for example, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” [emphasis in original]. The term “very likely” is specifically defined in the IPCC summaries to mean the “assessed likelihood, using expert judgment”, is greater than 90 per cent. Clive Hamilton contrasts the scientific and IPCC processes with those of many sceptics (see Atkin’s response here). He traces connections from relatively naïve people like Professor Aitkin back to people and web sites funded by ExxonMobil and others. Sceptics love to question the motives of climate scientists, but rarely mention the motives of the very powerful multi-trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry, parts of which are actively promoting doubt and disinformation in exactly the manner used by the tobacco industry for many years. Observations from the past two or three years, too recent to have been included in the 2007 IPCC Reports, show disturbing signs that the Earth’s response to our activities is happening much faster than expected. The most dramatic sign is a sudden acceleration of the rate of shrinkage of Arctic sea ice. Prominent NASA climate scientist Dr James Hansen is perhaps the most vocal, but far from alone, in arguing that the Earth may be very close to a tipping point beyond which large, unstoppable and irreversible climate change could occur. Scientific issues are not settled by appeals to authority, nor by a vote. That is not the issue here. The issue is whether scientists’ professional judgments have weight. Those in strategic positions in our society, like politicians and journalists, who treat scientists’ collective professional judgments as no better than any other opinion are being seriously irresponsible. You can ignore the IPCC if you want, but you should realise that its most recent assessment may have seriously understated the global warming problem. You can ignore James Hansen if you want, but you should know that his judgments from two or three decades ago are being broadly vindicated. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.91 Mb. Share with your friends:
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